What to know and how to boost your search presence
Hey, this is Tay Musslewhite from Kimberlite Digital Marketing. In this video, I discuss how search is fundamentally changing with the rise of AI. I explore the power of neural networks and how they learn context and meaning. I also emphasize the importance of producing content and leveraging first-party data in the age of AI.
This is a transcription of the above video. Please excuse any typos.
Hey, this is Tay Musslewhite with Kimberlite Digital Marketing, at digitalkimberlite.com is where we can be found my video today and articles.
We’re going to be talking about what I believe is the AI and the future of search. This encompasses not only organic search, but also paid search.
And let’s jump into it. The first thing, that I’d like to talk about is what is AI and what are these large language models that we’ve been hearing about.
Let’s go to NVIDIA’s website. NVIDIA, as you may know, is out there. They’re at the heart of this AI revolution because they make the chips that are able to handle the AI computing. So the first thing is large language models. They recognize, summarize, translate, predict, and generate content using very large datasets. This is where I believe search is changing fundamentally for AI.
In the past, when we thought about search, you know, Google saying that they wanted to organize the world’s information, think of it as organized, like in a file cabinet, so where when you search for it, they could go find it and then they could then serve it to you. That’s a very simple explanation I know, but that’s a good way to think of it.
Now think of search as where Google has gone or all these models, so it could be Google, could be chat GPT, could be Bard, they have gone and they have looked at everything on the internet and they have synthesized it, they have learned about it, they’ve summarized it, they’ve translated it, and now they can generate content based upon that.
When you think about that, it’s fundamental. So, where it used to be able, an effective search strategy could be just to make sure that, you know, you had some things out there for Google to find, and they could be very specific, they could be general. But we wanted to make sure that our business or our search results or our client search results were the ones that were being pointed to, essentially.
Now, it’s time to think about it in a much, more holistic manner and make sure that anywhere that these machines can go, extrapolate, find data, and then extrapolate it, let’s make sure that it’s consistent. Let’s make sure that there’s a good amount of it and let’s make sure that it’s all pointing to the same place. The way to think about it you know, the old name, address, and phone number. you know, that NAP, as we call it in the search industry.
You want to make sure that those are consistent now even more than ever. let’s take a look here at, you know, I wanted to talk about a couple things.
The first is, when we think about, you know, there was a perception that Google was behind when chat GPT came out. I actually think that Google has been, at the forefront of AI and large language models for a long time. I just think that they were kind of keeping it behind the curtain, so to speak.
In fact, here is an article that they wrote. That’s the link. You can get it from here. That’s the actual article. And it’s talking about when they were first translating English to German. You know, back in 2017. take a look at this.
Just furthering the discussion a little bit on what is a transformer model. It’s a neural network that learns context and thus meaning by tracking relationships and sequential data like the words in this sentence. Transformer models apply an evaluation. This is an evolving set of mathematical techniques called attention or self attention to detect subtle ways even distant data elements in a series influence and depend on each other.
So that is actually talking about, you know, in a sentence, but let’s extrapolate it to when they’re looking at everything out there related to your business. So, you know, think about that. Detect subtle ways even distant data elements in a series influence and depend on each other. So it’s making connections, it is enriching its data, and it is learning. It’s learning more and more and it’s doing this constantly now.
These machines are so fast and the computing power is so great that it’s something we’ve never seen before. And what does that mean? It means that search is continuing to evolve and where our traditional Google results, for lack of a better word, you know, they’ve come some, they’ve become somewhat predictable. We know what to do. We know how to get those results. It’s been proven over time, over and over again. It takes a lot of work, but we get them. What we don’t know now is exactly how that’s going to impact search, but here’s what I believe.
I believe that everything matters. So you need to be in every corner of the internet, producing content. Making sure that business name, address, and phone number are correct. And you need to be not only putting that out there, but leveraging your first party data. Now when we talk about, how these models are going into every corner of the internet.
A great example of that is what happened with, Reddit, earlier this year. It was in April of 2023. what happened was a lot you know, these subreddits went dark and it was a protest against, Reddit charging, for their data. Well, the reason, as it turned out, that they were charging for their data, is because these huge models were going in and learning every single day.
And here is, what Reddit CEO Steve Huffman said, the Reddit corpus of data is really valuable, but we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free. So Reddit is this huge repository of people talking about things, giving their opinions, in essence arguments and things rise to the top. And when you put a large language model to work on that data, it can begin to, do this to it. Learn context and meaning by tracking relationships and sequential data like the words in the sentence. has cut that off because they know that it’s valuable. They know that it’s a huge, as he called it, corpus of data that is very valuable.
Let’s take a look at what people in Google are saying about this. The first thing we’re going to go to is a Think with Google article called How AI is Changing Search Ads. And what I really wanted to point out here is right here at, you know, they’re talking about, hey, how are you using it?
Things like this, at 44 seconds, the way marketers appeal to consumers is by leveraging the data sets that they should already have. And if they’re not already in. Place, then this evolution of AI is the perfect wake up call.
So the emphasis on data, because that’s what these large language models such as bard chatGPT and others are doing, they’re analyzing all the data, they’re making the connections, and then they’re coming back, summarizing it with so, making the most of the data that you have from your customer, that first party data, because it’s the purest, it’s the piece of data information that you have about your customers to know what they want, to know how to personalize the ad copy and be more creative.
And then taking it a step further, AI relies on quality inputs. So for instance, there is conflicting information about what your address is, the AI is going to get confused, and it may even hallucinate. Now I believe that that’s going to get refined out of the system as we go on, these hallucinations, but the last thing you want is to confuse the AI and give the wrong information.
Thinking what you really want to do is leverage, develop a system to not only have, but leverage your first party data.
What cannot happen is that you are doing business in an ecosystem that restricts your access to your own customer data. I’m not going to name names, but there are some that a lot of my detailing clients use that data happens. This company’s marketing to their company, to their customers, but there’s an extra step or two involved for the shop to actually get to their data.
If you find your, yourself in one of those situations, you need to get out of it because it’s all about first-party data and those are your transactions that you are having with your customers. That has to be your data. It’s the purest thing. You know how much, You know how many times someone’s been to your business, how much they’ve spent, you can then use that data to upsell to them, to personalize it, and all of this is becoming easier and easier with AI.
Let’s dig further into what Google is saying. One of my favorite podcasts is called Hard Fork. It’s from the New York Times and a while back they actually interviewed Sundar Pichai, from Google on their podcast.
And the first thing was is without a doubt, Google has much more powerful AI in the box. when they were releasing, they’re such a huge. and I believe with such an intact user base that they had to be very conservative. When you have upwards of 90% of the search volume in the United States, there’s a lot of room for errors that would get a lot of publicity.
I really believe that that’s why they really put out a detuned model but even in this interview, you know, their CEO says, hey, we’ve been dealing with this for a long, long time. He references things like 2012, this paper. That I just referenced was from 2017. there’s a lot there. That Google is just going to roll out in a controlled manner, I believe, but as we’re going to hear him say himself or read him say himself is that this is a fundamental game changing technology like nothing that we have ever seen.
First off, they’re talking about Bard, which is Googles and saying it’s not as good as chatGPT thinks like that. And this is him saying, hey, this is just the beginning. we wanted to build trust and put in a layer of safety there. It’s an experiment. And they did say that it was a lightweight and efficient version of Lamda.
And, he’s basically just saying, look, we’ve got a ton of stuff out there. The next thing is this is how the CEO of Google is thinking about this. He’s saying it can be a very, very powerful assistant. Anybody who works with a personal assistant, you know, how life changing it is, but now imagine bringing that power in the context of every person’s day to day lives. That is a real potential we are talking about here. And so I think it’s very profound. So, think about that…he is talking about, imagine an individual model for each person. the power that that takes, number one, is immense, but then think about what it’s doing.
It is knowing your personal ecosystem and it’s matching up your wants, needs, desires, and searches, with what exists on the outside of your world. So that, summarization essentially of everything that’s happening out there will be at your fingertips or at your voice command or who knows what it’ll end up as.
But think about that from a business perspective. If you you know, here in Northbrook Illinois and said, hey, what’s the best pizza in Northbrook and order it for me is going to go look and think about where that can come from. It can come from number one. I believe it comes from Google or if you when Bard is at its best, it enters my questions without me having visit another website. But man, if Bard gets as good as you want it to be, how does the web survive? So if you think about it, that’s why I read it. Again, going back to why they said, no, you can’t essentially they’re saying you got to pay to play to use our information. These publishers are facing that, right? So, if Bard gets as good as you want it to be, how does the web survive?
Meaning, if Bard has gone out and found and cold related and synthesized all the information out there and can summarize that information very succinctly and correctly, why do you need to go to any other websites?
So here is Google’s answer. in search today, while these things are contentious, in search, we take pride it’s one of the largest searches and sources of traffic. And in fact, he says, year on year, the traffic we send outside is only grown. and he also says we, that’s another reason that they’re being careful with their search business, Google, in fact, has to preserve their search business, right? They have to be able to sell ads. They have to provide value to you. and so that’s super, super interesting. The next thing that I want to excited. That from a user standpoint, it expands the possibilities of what you can do.
So think about what this means to Google. They want to help you do things. So, he uses the example of, you know, you know, when video came in you know, we’ve had to adapt when videos came in. So people go to YouTube and look for all kinds of things and so people are looking for information. he is saying he feels like, it’s only the early stages of a new technology saying that we’re gonna figure out how to preserve search, but what you have to understand is that search has changed. So how these results come about are extremely different. It’s based on the whole synthesis of everything that’s out there, rather than, just pointing you to one specific thing.
They’re going to continue to experiment. The last thing is, to sum this up. So, this is the CEO of Google: “AI is the most profound technology humanity will ever work on. I’ve felt that for a while. I think it will get to the essence of what humanity is, and so this is the tip of the iceberg.”
So, clearly this is Google. Thinking quite literally that AI is going to change the world as we know it. The most profound technology humanity will ever work on.
What does that mean for business owners? It means that you have to now more than ever pay very, very, very close attention to everything that you’re doing online. I definitely recommend where in some cases in the past couple years, some SEOs and marketers were starting to make the case for hey, listings and things like that don’t matter anymore.
I would actually say that we need to make sure that your business is populated into every corner of the internet that you can right now. Sync your listings, create the listings. So ever you want to do it, there are paid services, you can do it yourself, whatever the case, do it. At my company, we believe in that. So we do offer an automated listing search. We also have a service, and then we also submit your data to listings aggregation.
I think that this is the foundation of what needs to happen to enhance your online. The other thing that I want to talk about is the first party data that was mentioned, you know, way back here and this.
So, number one, that data about your business is first party data. You are saying to the world, this is our name, this is our phone number, this is our address. And with the technology that exists today, there’s no reason. other thing is, you know, think of this as a wake up call and then that first party data, first party data.
You need to do something to make sure that you not only have access to that data, but then you’re using it. So a great example of this is if I contact your business, you need to get my email address so that you can market to me. Or just send me information, send me an estimate, send me whatever. The other thing, of course, is obviously my phone number preferably my cell phone number.
As a business that helps businesses do this type of thing, we have two things that we recommend. The first is Customer Quarry. It’s a customer relationship management and a marketing platform and then so that is for the email side and deals, you know, sales management, everything like that.
And then we also have Call Quarry, which every caller to your business, is sent to text saying, Hey, did you know that you can text with us also? That customer has to opt in before we can market to him, but it’s a great way to get more people that you can market to email and cell phone.
These things that can be done at scale and with personal. You want to do that. Get your first party data at scale and with personalization.
Last but not least is, this is all part of a transaction, right? So that’s the other thing that we can do in our customer query, our CRM and marketing automation software, is that based on the things that you buy from us or how you interact with us on our website you, click on something in the email, we can then use that data and it’s first party data because you’re on our website or my client’s website, that first party data with, we can then act upon it.
And then we close the loop, using more for using that first party data to then say, Hey, how was your experience with us? Think about the last time you ordered a something online. You got a purchase confirmation. You got a notification when it was shipped, got a notification that it’s on its way, then you got a picture of it when it showed up at your doorstep and then you probably got a follow up saying, Hey, how was the experience? So, five contacts and could be something that only cost you $5.
Think about that. If you’re a business that sells anything or provide services to anyone as you want to follow up and see how experience was. We help businesses do with what we call Review Quarry. We we can send, we can use that first party data. So my name, my email or the customer’s name, the customer’s email and or cell phone number, and we can reach out to them. Say, hey, how was it? We know you bought something with us. How was it? so that’s the wrap up here is that what you want to do is number one, you need to take control of your data and you need to leverage it. If you’re using a platform that does not allow you easy access to export, do anything you want with the data from your business, you need to switch platforms. The next thing that you need to do is you need to make sure that you are doing things all across the internet and that starts simply making sure that your information is correct.
This is especially key if you just move. a whole lot more with this, but I’m going to leave you with this at that.
Again, my name’s Tay Musslewhite, I work at Kimberlite Digital Marketing. We specialize in helping businesses make their business work for them. So using that first-party data, leveraging it, more business, keeping more customers ultimately having your business thrive. Alright, thanks a lot. Please give me a call if you have any questions or if I can help in any way.
